I’m sure I’m preaching to the wrong crowd here, but there’s one glaring oversight in our fearless leader’s list to becoming an American Man: a goddamn work ethic.

I’m sure I’m preaching to the wrong crowd here, but there’s one glaring oversight in our fearless leader’s list to becoming an American Man: a goddamn work ethic.

Plenty of people work in America and dress relatively well. They wear suits, carry briefcases and drink a Jack on the rocks after work, straight up and down. Let me tell you something about those people: There’s nothing more babyish than getting out of work and having to suck on your alcoholic baby bottle* for a few hours at a bar. What are you stressed about? Deadlines? Bosses? Gossiping like Puerto Rican women at the water cooler for a couple hours a day? Tough life, dude. When most people get out of work, all they need is a bed to sleep on so they can wake up and do it again tomorrow. But I guess as long as you don’t wear a fedora and avoid using emoticons, you the man.

Do you want to know when I started feeling like a man? When my hands stopped feeling like a little girl’s. It wasn’t when I traded in my Vibrams for pointy dress shoes -– it was when my hands looked like a burn victim’s. I like it that way and I’m willing to bet my shitty salary that you don’t get any calluses tippy-tip-tap-tapping away at a keyboard all day. You get them when you sweat and work with your hands.

So, if we’re discussing the de-masculization of the American Man, let’s start (and end) with the lack of work ethic in young people. All you can hear these days is the steady din of bitching –- bitching about schedules, bitching about bosses, bitching about bitches being bitches, bitching about no weekends off. WHAT IN THE HOLY FUCK IS A WEEKEND? I haven’t had a weekend off in years and I could not care less. I use the term “weekend” as a litmus test to determine whom I tolerate and whom I despise. Oh, you want to go to brunch? Die away from me, please. Brunch is for idiots who can’t wake up with a hangover at 8 AM and eat breakfast. But you want to drink with it? What, do you need an excuse to drink in the morning? Here’s my little nugget of wisdom and it’s free: Drink when you feel like drinking, idiot.

I’m not saying that you need to cook, carry out leaky garbage bags, get told that you have shit for brains by a sociopath chef or forego your state-mandated breaks for me to respect you (though it’s what I do every day), but whatever you do, just show up on time and do it well. There’s a lot of talk on this site about Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino and most of it positive (and obviously I agree), but if there’s one thing you take from ol’ Walt, it can’t be his lawn or his pants or his predilection for funny racial slurs. It has to be his willingness to work a shit job every day, support dipshit kids and find a way to appreciate it all.

There you go. That’s a work ethic.

*I think I might have stolen this from a commenter. I’m not sure. If you’re the commenter who wrote this originally, step forward and allow me to deem you as the one commenter who isn’t a fucking clown.

i fucking hate when i shake some potential friends hand and it feels like a womans hand, because i knnow they immedeatly think “oh shit, thats what a real mans hand feels like” also i have a 9 inch penis. thank you.

How is it everyone elses fault that your job SUCKS and you don’t get weekends? Trying to wrap my head around this. Both my grandfathers worked awful backbreaking jobs to support their families and they HATED it. But because they had no education in the late 50s, that’s what they had to do. Not because it was some kind of badge of honor. Quit whining about how bad your hands hurt. A real man with a real work ethic doesn’t need to broadcast his holier than thou bullshit.

Only a spineless faggot would work weekends (without out time and a half or double time wages), skip breaks, or take any shit at all from a chef. I am sick of fucking restaurant workers thinking they are tough guys. Having a work ethic and being a fucking pussy aren’t the same thing. Pussies get stuck carrying leak trash bags. Men refuse too be such fucking pushovers. If a man is faced with a bullshit job like that he quits and makes a job for himself with his fucking work ethic. That’s why as a carpenter if I don’t want to do it I don’t. I go find more work. But if I don’t find work I fucking live with it. Better then being a fucking pushover. Never work for shitty pay. A grown man should make at least $40+ an hour. If my high school drop out, lazy hippie ass can do it anyone can.

Also that picture is of some office working man baby after he did some pull-ups. I crush little hands like that and I would crush yours too if you tried to give me a mans handshake.

This article’s dangerously close to being as whiny as those at whom it rants, but your heart is most certainly in the right place. Remember when a decent work ethic was considered the norm and it took so much more than that to earn respect? Yeah, me neither.

Gran Torino, WTF, you puss? That was a fucking MOVIE. The people in it wore MAKEUP.

Restaurant work? HAHAHAHAHahahahah HoHOHOHOHhohohoho

Go be a highrise steelworker or an oil-rig roughneck or a high-volume framing carpenter or whatever heavy outdoor trade 20-degrees-below-zero blizzard-up-your shirt-tails all fucking day long, where you can, at any moment, fall, get crushed, get brained, or at least delimbed, and THEN get back to us, collidge boy.

Sociopathic chef, my ass. How about when a Texan foreman having his usual daily Texan psychotic fugue insists on putting his whole crew under 5 tons of 3/4 inch plate metal being craned with defective straps to a cantilever in a tornadic windstorm, and the plates predictably start slipping overhead, and one of them slips out of the bundles and falls and corkscrews vertically down, ripping off an inch of your outer bicep but otherwise sparing you?

uh…so why exactly choose a life of shit when there are easier options? why shouldn’t you make 40+ an hour with time and a half if they make you work weekends, if you can? because you get to call yourself a “man”? The amount of hard work and stress a man endures is inversely correlated to the ease with which he can get laid; by working hard you’re taking it up the ass and slowly cutting off your balls at the same damn time. if thats your idea of a noble, respectable life, count me out.

The heart of the article is in the right place but Pee is right. My mom and pops were Haitian immigrants who worked shit jobs tooth-and-nail so that I could have things better…..just b/c someone has things better DOESN’T immediately classify them as some lame, no-good, pussy.

Chefs and kitchen hacks are the biggest pussies put there. Their hands are caloused from all the fucking cigarettes they smoke, not from the “heavy lifting” they think they do. If the premise of this post is that suit wearing paper pushers are the ego driven pussies, I’d suggest you to spend five minutes in a kitchen and tell me restaurant staff aren’t exactly the same, if not worse. chefs have just as big egos as any Trump wannabe out there. Any profession, no-brain power required or otherwise, has all sorts. All sorts.

Thanks for all the anecdotal How to be a Man-isms on the site lately. Nothing manlier than a bunch of male Gen X’ers (why the fuck did I lend validity to the Postmodern fucktards by capitalizing the G and the X just then? . . . the P for that matter as well?) having their tete-a-tetes publicized on the blog they all contribute to. Yeah. Ok. Chalk one up for the mens. Bullshit. This is bullshit and you all know it.

So, I’m confused. Do all these people in Brooklyn wish they lived in Minnesota in an ironic way (even though they grew up in Vermont, Canada, and Ohio apparently?) or do they actually wish they had hard chargin’ back breaking jobs for realsies.

I suppose it would help make “workwear” not look like a costume. Don’t get me wrong I’m all for people working shit jobs, I think everyone should have to work in a restaurant long enough to realize not to fuck with people who are in charge of your food, and be able to at the very least frame out a wall.

If your job doesn’t have a serious chance for injury or death than its not fuckin manly. Sorry to break it to you but restaurant work doesn’t fall into this category.Oh by the way working through your breaks without compensation doesn’t show how hard of a work ethic you have, it shows how willing you are to allow someone to take advantage of you.

No mention of the work ethic that got me decent grades in school so I could do college and the career that grants, even though it meant fending off bullies and enduring life at the bottom of the social food chain. That must have been something else. Again, if you aren’t defining manhood for yourself, then you’re just a grown boy.

i’ll always remember a ‘This Old House’ episode where Bill Viola (before he was fired) was talking to a seasoned brick layer and the bricklayer demanded, “let me see your hands” and and Bill showed his soft putty hands to the brick layer and the brick layer looked them over and then showed his own with pride and in dramatic difference said “THESE are a Man’s hands”.
Ive bitched plenty in this land about my placement within the infrastructure of jobs here and there and in part it is because i was a depressed and angry fucker that knows as hard as i work within my physical nature of man, that simply by being so a gap is immediately demarcated with a boarder of rank in separation. So be it and if you stay doing what you do with bitch attitude than you might as well be the bitch or gun down a few and kill and make the news because i’m stuck somewhere in between. I am the wall..I know I fuck better and am more relentless with the raw bottom line of what i am, at least by what Ive experienced on an basis of truth. I may be far from a good bullshitter and lack the twinkle in my eye but I react with the best when it comes to Here Now and No Other Way.
So, physically and mentally, culturally, ect… we come from different places. In NY it can be more about the social thing above anything else at times, and the good at heart know that there is that truth which exists beyond machismo and rank. but hey, did you know the average worker ant takes 250 naps a day, each a little more than 1 minute. equating to 4hrs and 48mn of sleep a day to best protect the queen(s). So this means the queen(s) can rest easy and sleep regularly 90 times a day, a little over 6mn each time. The idea for us grunts is to elevate beyond the work-side hierarchy and enrich and be a man with community and home or what not.
That pussy Sam Peckinpah once said that if a guy can’t a least be a man within his own home then he isn’t a man.
Today I pass a bum (with a bulbous nose that twice out does W C Fields rosy tip). With his cart, push himself under the ‘highline’ end that is still unfinished and when i saw him later on, he had this fold out beach chair under him taking a happy snooze. Shnoz sticking out under his down tilted cap and poking me in my whatever.
Doing God’s work and accepting pride humbly, maybe not/maybe so– but he sure looked like a pretty piggy to me.
Put more on your plate, because there’s way heavier workloads the world over and way heavier situations that men must stand up to. It doesn’t matter if you cant stand before all as a man because we are all unfinished for the most part. Responsibility is one thing and being a lover in touch with his feminine side is another. for real. Compassion, knowing that bravery isn’t a facade, and most of all to be a man means being opened to our misgivings and learning nonstop and respect is another and blah blah blah I have a huge cock that will decimate the universe of pussy galore island. I like big butts and i can not lie.

I’m too aware of cognitive dissonance to think that I’m getting something out of working harder than my friends and getting paid less. I do it because I have no skills, but don’t try to spin it as being badass.

Glad to say none of this ‘how to be a man’ shit applies to me, i just finished work and my hands look exactly like the picture but without the blood because the scabs are on my knuckles, getme

Also the ‘hipsters are afraid of black people’ shit doesnt apply to me either because i learned years ago to punch a black man in his fucking face.

Other than that, we’re good. Except for that guy The Fool’s articles like the new one on Euro Rap could you be more irrelevant and lame you fucking internet FRUIT. whats next an article about how kim kardashian totally sucks?

ask barf is the best thing on this site and thats for girls sooooooooooo

I’ve always found it interesting how workers from either side of the manly occupation or social-economic spectrum, like to shit talk kitchen workers for making meals they won’t/can’t/don’t want to make themselves. I don’t make much money and knew I wouldn’t going in but I like cooking for people. You cock suckers included. So when you clock out after 15 hours of running 3-1/4 inch conduit 200+ meters or deliberations have finally come to an end and want to just grab a bite wherever because your so tuckered. I’ll be making it, gladly. Burns, cuts, weekends, no benefits and you, included.

Let’s talk about the “workin’ man.” 15 years ago I was filling dumpsters on a construction site. 4 years ago I started construction on my own home, which took 3 years. So here’s what I can confidently tell you about people who work in the trades…

20 percent are the greatest. Great at what they do. Great to be around. They come in on budget. You’d talk to them all day and you remain friends even after you’ve paid them out.

60 percent can’t manage their own or anyone else’s time or labor. They accidentally rob you blind because of it.

20 percent are out to actively rob you. They get your deposit, demo your shit, ask for more money, don’t pay their subs and when you won’t pay them out, the put a lien on your house. They are parasites and scumbags and can and will rob you more effectively than any ten lawyers.

Just because you work with your hands doesn’t mean you’re a great fella. 80 percent of these people shouldn’t be able to feed themselves at all… I’m talking sinks installed with the faucet shooting water onto the floor, unable even to go to Home Depot and by more of the same brand of paint, welders who spray sparks all over dry grass during a California heat wave.

So whatever Bob Seeger song you’re living in, I suggest you stay in it… They work harder there.

declaring your “manliness” via the internet is not manly. the gross fetish-ization of imagined working class values on this website is bizarre and reveals some weird insecurities. in other words, guess who spends time whining about babies? Babies do.

why does this site always act like there’s some shortage of “real men”? There have always been jocks and nerds, masculine and feminine, brainy and brawny, ambitious and lazy and there always will be. My uncle is a “real man” and he’s great, but he’s married to an ugly woman and he’s boring when it comes to anything other than fixing cars,building things, and fishing. Do I care? No. To each their own.

^^why does this site always act like there’s some shortage of “real men”

that’s easy to answer: it’s because the site is officiated and contributed to by a bunch of soft-handed wusses who’ve never and never will work for years on end at a dirty big-infrastructure-type job. Therefore this sites animating spirits are alienated from their own life-sustaining physical agency. And so, faggotlike as their upper-middle-class over-edjumacated upbringing has thus rendered them, they both fear and revere physical competence. Yet these faggots’ very own underexercised testosteronic hormonal drives ineluctably drag them toward slurpily idealizing the hard-handed man’s practiced elan in applying his body to bend the upredictable and dangerous material world to his personal (stubborn, hardened, erect) will.

I worked a couple summers for my father on a construction site. All of the guys there thought I was a fag because I wore shorts to the job and my dad was the boss. Hhaa, they were right. Fuck that getting up at 5:30 am shit to go do manual labor for ten hours where they only thing you look forward to is your 15 minutes of coffee and a giant gross sub.

Dad tried his best to teach me how to do manly stuff, but instead I became a writer, and I don’t know how to do jack shit except. Instead or working I sit at home all day on the computer, go to the gym, and cry about my feelings.

haha when you first started going off I thought you had a real “manly” job (though I’m not really sure what that is… masonry? That prob counts…) BUT THEN you let it slip that you work in the service industry! HAHAHA oooh boy a KITCHEN! Whatta man! don’t you realize EVERYONE’S worked in a goddamn kitchen? Haha sweet christ almighty

What fucking pussy works when he doesn’t have to? I do admit that some ‘boys’ have no survival instinct after they leave their parents, but who gives a shit? And who the fuck wants to work hard labor anyway? I dug ditches and shoveled shit, LITERALLY for a job. I couldn’t wait to finish my fucking education, so I didn’t have to hang out with those uneducated idiots who think every thing they don’t understand is ‘gay’. I’m over this preachy bullshit!

What total horse shit. I think what the you meant to say was that to be a man you have to be accountable. But what your writing actually said is that to be a man you have to be a burly male who likely loves the smell of other males.

shit i missed the party again but im just going to comment on myself.. these days faggot pussy office fairy work is WAY harder than outdoorsy dirty constructioney demo-ey work…….. since all the big companies cut the fuck out of their budgets all the perks got stripped from office underlings (in jobs where there was perks to begin with, ie travel, car, shit like that) and the managers ate up all the good stuff in the budget, and now working in an office is a unique kind of hell, unless yr in management in which case you are a weird unique kind of 21st century human parasite.

get out of the office. sitting at the desk all day will kill you in 5 different ways. working in close proximity with people you despise will kill you. the computer screen will bake your eyes and brain in radiation & make your soul lethargic and sad. & meanwhile dudes on building sites everywhere are doing sweet fuck all and getting paid for it pretty decently why even the other day someone brought a weber to the job site an we had a fuckin bbq at lunch when the bosses were away i like my life
FUCK working in an office.